I just tried asking GPT-4 to respond to me, placing a question near the end of its response, and to roll a die at the end. If the die has its maximal value, I need to spend a minute thinking before I respond, else I can just respond normally. And it worked. GPT-4 asked good enough questions, which lead to interesting enough places, that I’d recommend other people try this. Though please ask for, like, a three sided or even two-sided dice as a ten-sided dice is too much.
I chose 1-minute to make the feedback loops faster, and also because I think I understand why you recommended 5 minutes first and knew I didn’t need to start at that value. For people whose minds are resistant to thinking at all on the spot, going blank or wandering off topic, 5 minutes gives them enough time to have a minor flash of inisght relevant to whatever they’re meant to think of. Then they can start improving that over time until they can think for several minutes if forced to. I’ve already got that skill, I just haven’t made it habitual. So that’s why I went with 1 minute.
But you can also make feedback loops tighter by asking GPT-4 to give short responses, and sticking to short questions yourself so you can simulate answering questions under pressure and resisting that pressure when needed.
Another way to improve things would be to notice what questions are important yourself, but being able to notice that you can just think about a question at all, and practicing that motion of thinking, is a useful subskill of its own. Then you can practice noticing when a question is worth seriously thiking about. Also, GPT-4 just asked a lot of questions worth thinking about, so I don’t think you need to worry about it never asking you questions worth thinking of.
In fact, you could ask it to just throw you some softball questions and that may well work.
Huh! I would not have previously guessed chatGPT had enough of the social norm pressure to get people to respond too fast. Thinking about it, that’s irrelevant, because I can just practice thinking by the clock with a textbook. Upvote, that seems like a potentially useful way to practice and you’re practicing!
I do suggest trying at least one pause on a 5 minute timer to see if anything interesting happens with the extra minutes, not because I particularly doubt you, but it is a cheap test to try. (By definition it’s not going to take that long!)
But I’m curious how you practiced this skill. Are you one of those incomprehensible beings that can just set a trigger action plan for something like that? I’ve always struggled to create TAPs as sophisticated as that, so I’d be curious if you had some other method. LIke, going on Omegle (RIP) with a checklist?
Socially, I had the opposite problem and learning this involved relaxing a different skill.
I went from taking way too long to answer social conversation cues to basically normal speed. The training regime for that involved a lot of games[1] and improv practice. By forcing myself to move fast and allow myself to make mistakes I wouldn’t have made if I’d thought about it for longer, I got faster at speaking in conversation.
One of the games I played was chess, and chess clocks are decent practice for this! I looked up chess puzzles and spent five minutes with a clock trying to solve them, or played games with wonky clocks where I was once-a-game allowed to pause for five minutes to think and that pause didn’t count against the regular clock. (A lot of these games were against the computer, which was very patient.) A thing that I think I’m better at now, but could not put into useful words yet, is thinking within the box of five minutes. (or other timers.) There’s an idea of. . . noticing wasted motion and not repeating loops, of deliberately splitting the time into brainstorming and winnowing and refining and murphyjutsu, that I improved by slow trial and error.
As for taking the time out in conversations these days, it’s largely tied to a weird little alarm in the back of my head that goes off when it notices longer term or large resource commitments about to happen, plus the ability to turn off (or rather, stop maintaining) a different set of alarms for when I’m about to violate social norms. The trickiest part for me happens at the interface, and I suspect that’s unusually unique to how my head is configured.
I used to play RTS games like Age of Empires by hitting the pause button whenever I wanted to think for longer, often taking three or four times as much time in pause as I did letting the clock advance.
This is a bit tangential but is there a reason you avoid using the commonly accepted scientific/biological terms and invent your own terminology instead?
The comment chain is difficult to understand for someone who just noticed it under ‘Recent Discussions’.
If there’s a commonly accepted scientific/biological term for something and I use a different term, most likely one of two things is happening.
One is that I don’t know the term. I’m not a biologist by training or inclination. I’m not pursuing a career recognizable as a scientist. Sometimes I read their textbooks or papers and pick something up without the accompanying fluency.
The second is that I’m trying to simplify. I’m a big fan of up goer five and putting concepts in different words to see if that helps different people understand. Usually if I’m doing that, I’ll leave a reference to the concept I’m talking about in the form I learned it from. I’m not always careful to do that though, especially if I’m writing quickly or I’m not sure where I got the idea from.
I’ll repeat Raemon’s question. What’s the term you think is commonly accepted to describe something I’m talking about with different words?
2 is an interesting strategy. But that ‘up goer five’ term is an example of what I’m referring to.
If by happenstance the ‘xkcd’ link failed for whatever reason, the median passing reader will likely never bother to puzzle out the meaning, at least not without further elaboration.
I’ll repeat Raemon’s question.
It doesn’t seem like he formed a question? In fact it appears as if he specifically refrained from doing so, even after I pointed it out.
What’s the term you think is commonly accepted to describe something I’m talking about with different words?
“up goer five” instead of “simplification”, “keeping things simple”, etc...
For your prior comment, I don’t know what your describing to think of equivalents, hence why I was asking. Asking me doesn’t seem to make sense?
Raemon’s question was ‘which terms did you not understand and which terms are you advocating replacing them with?’ As far as I can see, you did not share that information anywhere in the comment chain (except with the up goer five example, which already included a linked explanation), so it’s not really possible for interlocutors to explain or replace whichever terms confused you.
You’re the one who asked “why did Screwtape invent his own terminology”, but I don’t know what words you think there was an existing terminology for. From my perspective you’re the one who didn’t include terms.
I just tried asking GPT-4 to respond to me, placing a question near the end of its response, and to roll a die at the end. If the die has its maximal value, I need to spend a minute thinking before I respond, else I can just respond normally. And it worked. GPT-4 asked good enough questions, which lead to interesting enough places, that I’d recommend other people try this. Though please ask for, like, a three sided or even two-sided dice as a ten-sided dice is too much.
I chose 1-minute to make the feedback loops faster, and also because I think I understand why you recommended 5 minutes first and knew I didn’t need to start at that value. For people whose minds are resistant to thinking at all on the spot, going blank or wandering off topic, 5 minutes gives them enough time to have a minor flash of inisght relevant to whatever they’re meant to think of. Then they can start improving that over time until they can think for several minutes if forced to. I’ve already got that skill, I just haven’t made it habitual. So that’s why I went with 1 minute.
But you can also make feedback loops tighter by asking GPT-4 to give short responses, and sticking to short questions yourself so you can simulate answering questions under pressure and resisting that pressure when needed.
Another way to improve things would be to notice what questions are important yourself, but being able to notice that you can just think about a question at all, and practicing that motion of thinking, is a useful subskill of its own. Then you can practice noticing when a question is worth seriously thiking about. Also, GPT-4 just asked a lot of questions worth thinking about, so I don’t think you need to worry about it never asking you questions worth thinking of.
In fact, you could ask it to just throw you some softball questions and that may well work.
Huh! I would not have previously guessed chatGPT had enough of the social norm pressure to get people to respond too fast. Thinking about it, that’s irrelevant, because I can just practice thinking by the clock with a textbook. Upvote, that seems like a potentially useful way to practice and you’re practicing!
I do suggest trying at least one pause on a 5 minute timer to see if anything interesting happens with the extra minutes, not because I particularly doubt you, but it is a cheap test to try. (By definition it’s not going to take that long!)
I’m definitely going to vary the pause duration.
But I’m curious how you practiced this skill. Are you one of those incomprehensible beings that can just set a trigger action plan for something like that? I’ve always struggled to create TAPs as sophisticated as that, so I’d be curious if you had some other method. LIke, going on Omegle (RIP) with a checklist?
Socially, I had the opposite problem and learning this involved relaxing a different skill.
I went from taking way too long to answer social conversation cues to basically normal speed. The training regime for that involved a lot of games[1] and improv practice. By forcing myself to move fast and allow myself to make mistakes I wouldn’t have made if I’d thought about it for longer, I got faster at speaking in conversation.
One of the games I played was chess, and chess clocks are decent practice for this! I looked up chess puzzles and spent five minutes with a clock trying to solve them, or played games with wonky clocks where I was once-a-game allowed to pause for five minutes to think and that pause didn’t count against the regular clock. (A lot of these games were against the computer, which was very patient.) A thing that I think I’m better at now, but could not put into useful words yet, is thinking within the box of five minutes. (or other timers.) There’s an idea of. . . noticing wasted motion and not repeating loops, of deliberately splitting the time into brainstorming and winnowing and refining and murphyjutsu, that I improved by slow trial and error.
As for taking the time out in conversations these days, it’s largely tied to a weird little alarm in the back of my head that goes off when it notices longer term or large resource commitments about to happen, plus the ability to turn off (or rather, stop maintaining) a different set of alarms for when I’m about to violate social norms. The trickiest part for me happens at the interface, and I suspect that’s unusually unique to how my head is configured.
I used to play RTS games like Age of Empires by hitting the pause button whenever I wanted to think for longer, often taking three or four times as much time in pause as I did letting the clock advance.
This is a bit tangential but is there a reason you avoid using the commonly accepted scientific/biological terms and invent your own terminology instead?
The comment chain is difficult to understand for someone who just noticed it under ‘Recent Discussions’.
If there’s a commonly accepted scientific/biological term for something and I use a different term, most likely one of two things is happening.
One is that I don’t know the term. I’m not a biologist by training or inclination. I’m not pursuing a career recognizable as a scientist. Sometimes I read their textbooks or papers and pick something up without the accompanying fluency.
The second is that I’m trying to simplify. I’m a big fan of up goer five and putting concepts in different words to see if that helps different people understand. Usually if I’m doing that, I’ll leave a reference to the concept I’m talking about in the form I learned it from. I’m not always careful to do that though, especially if I’m writing quickly or I’m not sure where I got the idea from.
I’ll repeat Raemon’s question. What’s the term you think is commonly accepted to describe something I’m talking about with different words?
2 is an interesting strategy. But that ‘up goer five’ term is an example of what I’m referring to.
If by happenstance the ‘xkcd’ link failed for whatever reason, the median passing reader will likely never bother to puzzle out the meaning, at least not without further elaboration.
It doesn’t seem like he formed a question? In fact it appears as if he specifically refrained from doing so, even after I pointed it out.
“up goer five” instead of “simplification”, “keeping things simple”, etc...
For your prior comment, I don’t know what your describing to think of equivalents, hence why I was asking. Asking me doesn’t seem to make sense?
You would be the only who could know for certain.
Raemon’s question was ‘which terms did you not understand and which terms are you advocating replacing them with?’
As far as I can see, you did not share that information anywhere in the comment chain (except with the up goer five example, which already included a linked explanation), so it’s not really possible for interlocutors to explain or replace whichever terms confused you.
I don’t know which terms you didn’t understand and which terms you’re advocating replacing them with.
Thanks for sharing. Did you forget to include the terms you are also confused about or the question you wanted to ask?
I don’t see them on my end.
You’re the one who asked “why did Screwtape invent his own terminology”, but I don’t know what words you think there was an existing terminology for. From my perspective you’re the one who didn’t include terms.
Of course not? My prior comment was only two sentences, it would be incredibly unlikely for anyone to be able to guess the exact terms and words.